POINT OF VIEW

2016 represents the bicentenary of the birth Ferdinand II. Ferdinand of Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha (1816- 1885), following his purchase of the ruins of the Jerónimo de Nossa Senhora da Pena Monastery, and with support from Baron von Eschwege (1777-1855), in 1838 began construction of the National Palace of Pena and a Park spanning 85 hectares. In total and complete symbiosis, for the last two decades they have integrated the Cultural Landscape of Sintra, registered by UNESCO as World Heritage and encapsulating the greatest romantic architectural landmark in Portugal. Ferdinand II – also commonly known as the ‘artist king’ – was one of the most important patrons of the arts in Portugal. Renowned as a collector, not only from the artistic panorama but also of species of flora from the four corners of the world (Nordic forests, Australia, New Zealand, North America, Brazil and...), he transformed Sintra from a rural landscape with only low level tree coverage into the lush scenario that we today encounter and rendering the National Palace of Pena and its Park into an installation established by man in permanent dialogue with the pre-existing nature.

“Point of View” arises out of the expression Point de Vue, applied in landscape architecture and interrelating directly with the concept of perspective. This seeks to set out a contemporary (but also timeless) vision on the Man/Nature binomial and, simultaneously, a cultural dialogue between them. This dialogue was established a priori by Ferdinand II at the time of his design of a project in which Art/Architecture/Nature were mutually interwoven. On the premise of providing continuity to this dialogue, “Point of View” gathers together, in the National Palace of Pena Park, 10 national and international artists - Alberto Carneiro (PT), Alexandre Farto/Vhils (PT), Antonio Bokel (BR), Bosco Sodi (MX), Gabriela Albergaria (PT), João Paulo Serafim (PT), NeSpoon (PL), Nils-Udo (GER), Paulo Arraiano (PT) and Stuart Ian Frost (UK) – for an in situ exhibition commissioned by Parques de Sintra.

Based upon the historical and conceptual assumptions of Ferdinand II, “Point of View” now endows continuity to a culturally pre-established dialogue but with a very contemporary perspective; a reflection in which the cultural and natural landscapes are not opposing but rather complementary languages as happens with the dichotomies light/dark, interior/exterior, and tangible/intangible. Transporting this discourse into the exhibition context essentially engenders an intimate dialogue between Nature and Culture. This intentional displacement seeks to play with the idea of creativity within the conditions of its remote and seminal origins and thus seeking to feed our desire for a universal language, an intelligible structure capable of spreading a collective subconscious in an era saturated with interfaces and satellites – technological, artificial –, thereby returning an emotive and contemplative experience to the universe of visual representation.

This - Man/Nature - dialogue correspondingly questions whether a moment, an epoch, in which, to a greater or lesser extent, there looms the restlessness of those who inhabit a space in which not everything may be grasped, where speed becomes proportional to forgetting in generating a condition that leads us to reinvent the way in which we read and interpret reality and in which there is debate about new forms of dialogue, human relations and processes of contemplation as well as the relationship with those features pre-existing prior to Man. This also questions that deemed contemporaneous society, controlled by artificial satellites, in which the speed of post-digital generation dictates time and artificially replaces the natural/analogic world. The frequent scroll through reality in the search for “new histories”, in which the reference to contemplation becomes lost, increasingly contributes towards the dislocation of human beings from their natural elements.

In this context, the ten artists work as agents for the re-connection and dialogue between the binomial of Man/Earth (concepts that in their essence are the same even while a notion that gains little traction in that deemed contemporary society) through a process of geographic acupuncture that thus fosters different in situ dialogues with a living organism. In this way, “Point of View” strives to celebrate and recall this correlation and the collaboration first launched by Ferdinand II in 1838 following his building of a neuralgic bridge to human cultural heritage.

(…) abstract painting is the successor to landscape, a logical outgrowth of its antimimetic tendencies. Perhaps abstraction, the international and imperial style of the twentieth century is best understood as carrying out the task of landscape by other means (…) (Kenneth Clark)

An incision into the landscape. White as a reference for human action, an unnatural element, the imposition of the urban territory onto the natural landscape. A blow against the living body, the Park (already the fruit of previous cultural actions on the natural framework of reference), seeks to recall the binomials sometimes forgotten within the current context that involves the major urban spaces: body/earth; man/nature.In situ a white crevice is set out in the earth to depict the human imposition on the natural territory. This living territory, a body. The surroundings here represent a space pre-existing the human being – nature. As a living organism that shall react to each external element. The same extends to a process of transformation and loss of expression and, in the end, disappearing.